GPA

Answered

I've attached this link to a % percentage to 4.0 scale GPA converter.

I hope you find it useful.

Just create a spreadsheet of your transcript % grades in one column, the letter grade in the 2nd column, and the 4.0 scale grade in the third column.

Remember that typically full-year courses like Biology or Calculus count for 1.0 unit or 1.0 credit, while an elective like health or PE might count as 0.50.

So if you have to say 3 years of classes that up to like 20 units and a cumulative tally of 4.0 scale scores of 70, you divide 70/20 and get a 3.5 GPA for example. This would be an unweighted GPA

To calculate what colleges might want to see as your course rigor GPA or weight GPA, most American high schools at 1.0 pts to the 4.0 scale for AP or IB classes and 0.50 for an Honors Class like Honors Chemistry. So if you received an A or 95% in AP Chemistry that would count as a 5.0 not a 4.0 and if you took Honors Chemistry and got an A that would count as a 4.5, not a 4.0. This is how the American system works for 90% of students. Boarding schools and some private schools have their own unique grade scale but you needn't concern yourself about that.

So when you read blog posts about kids having a 4.31 Weighted GPA and a 3.78 Unweighted GPA, it means that they were an A- Student like 93% and took a lot of difficult classes like AP or Honors classes to bump up their GPA. Note some schools have severe grade inflation for weighted classes and give out 6.0 for IB classes and 5.0 for honors classes. So don't read into the WGPA too much. I was watching a youtube video of a student who had a 3.27 unweighted GPA and a weighted GPA of 4.32 which sounds great but when you consider the base GPA, it means her school had a lot of grade inflation. This student posted their ACT and SAT scores of 15 and 880 which are like 22 percentile and 19 percentile of the 4 million kids who take the 2 tests so the school obviously did not do a good job preparing kids for college. Some kids have low GPAs like 3.5 and low weighted GPAs like 3.9 but get ACT/SAT scores like 27/1290 which are 85% percentile scores and these kids are definitely college-ready.

https://pages.collegeboard.org/how-to-convert-gpa-4.0-scale